symposium

This interdisciplinary symposium set out to explore the potential futures of care in light of recent critical interrogations of the human, life and care, the emergence of affective technologies (including social robots), and the turn to entanglement in critical and cultural theory.

It included scholars working on care and its adjacent concerns – disability, vulnerability, interdependency, responsiveness, and responsibility — in a range of interconnected disciplines, such as medical humanities, posthumanism, affect theory, new materialism, ecological humanities, animal studies and critical race theory. We considered care beyond the human, the animal, or even the biological, exploring how care functions both within and beyond what Elizabeth Povinelli calls “the carbon imaginary”: her term for Western epistemologies’ covert conflation of life and being, biology and ontology.

The programme includes papers that explore the art, technologies and socio-politics of possible care futures, moving beyond conventional benefits/risks analysis to consider the broader implications of caregiving relationships in more-than-human worlds.

If you have questions about the symposium, please contact A.I.Defalco@leeds.ac.uk.